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MAN and HIS RECORDS 


UNIFORM WITH THIS VOLUME 


HOW THE WORLD GREW UP 

The Story of Anthropology 

RACES OF MEN 

The Story of Ethnology 

HOW THE WORLD SUPPORTS MAN 

The Story of Human Geography 

THE TONGUES OF MAN 

The Story of Languages 

MAN AND HIS CUSTOMS 

The Story of Folkways 

HOW THE WORLD IS RULED 

The Story of Government 

MAN AND HIS RICHES 

The Story of Economics 

HOW THE WORLD LIVES 

The Story of Sociology 

THIS MAN-MADE WORLD 

The Story of Inventions 


Thomas S. Rockwell Company 

Publishers 

CHICAGO 








Publishers Note 


This book presents in popular form the 
present state of science. It has been reviewed 
by a specialist in this field of knowledge. An 
excerpt from this review follows: 


u In his MAN AND HIS RECORDS 
Mr. Barnes has*done a fine piece of work. 
He has explained the intricacies of the 
origin and growth of the alphabet in a 
simple , interesting and truthful way. It 
is highly gratifying to me that in this 
book for younger minds there is so de¬ 
pendable an account as one of the most 
significant phases of the development of 
human culture” 


Signed: B. L. Ullman 

Professor of Latin 
The University of Chicago 







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Many years ago men carved pictures on the stone 
walls of their cave homes 
























/ 

MAN and HIS RECORDS 


By 

Franklin Barnes 

u 

Drawings by 
Ben Stahl 



THOMAS S. 


ROCKWELL COMPANY 

CHICAGp 

I 93 I 



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Copyright, 1931, by 
THOMAS S. ROCKWELL COMPANY 

CHICAGO 


Printed in United States of America 


©CU 40598 

AUG -3 1931 


CONTENTS 


How People First Learned to Write 11 

Why do people write? How many letters are 
there in our alphabet? What did the alphabet do 
for us? From where does our alphabet come? 

Why did early man draw pictures? What did he 
draw pictures of? With what did they draw? 

What drawbacks did pictures have? How did the 
American Indians write? Was the game of rebus 
valuable to us? How many steps led to our pres¬ 
ent alphabet? 

The Writing of the American Indians 29 

How did the Indians use nature signs? How were 
wampum belts used? How was cord used to keep 
records? Who were the Mayas? How did they 
write? Did they leave records? 

The Chinese Way of Writing 36 

Did the Chinese invent a way to write? What 
form did they finally use? What were theif three 
ways of writing? Who were the first printers? 

How did the Japanese learn to write? 

Writing in Ancient Egypt and Babylonia 42 

Did the Egyptians know how to write? How did 
they write? When did the Egyptians learn how 
to write? Why was their writing difficult to read? 

Did the Babylonians invent an alphabet? Can 
we read this ancient writing? 

How the Alphabet Was Born 54 

Who invented the first alphabet? Who were the 
Phoenicians? Why did the Phoenicians use an 
alphabet? How did they use the alphabet? How 
did the Hebrews write? 


62 


VI The Story of the Greek Alphabet 

Did the Greeks borrow the Phoenician alphabet? 

How did the Greeks finally write? What happened 
to the Grecian alphabet? 

VII The Story of the Roman Alphabet 69 

How did the Romans get their alphabet? How 
did they change the alphabet? What characters 
did the Romans add? Where did the Romans 
carry their alphabet ? 

VIII The Alphabets of Asia, Oceania, and 

Africa 79 

How did the alphabet travel? Who carried the 
alphabet to India? How did the Hindu alphabet 
spread? Did the Arabs have an alphabet? How 
did the Arabic alphabet spread? What great 
country used it? 

IX Writing in the Middle Ages 89 

What instruments did the Romans write with? 
Where did small letters come from? Who were 
the Angles and Saxons? From where do our Eng¬ 
lish words come from? How many letters do the 
Italians use? Who gave us our numerals? Are 
they important to us? 

X The Coming of the Printing Press 103 

Did the Chinese find printing easy? Why was not 
printing done in Greece and Rome? How did the 
Chinese make paper? Who was Johannes Guten¬ 
berg? What has modern machinery done for 
Printing? Would the early Phoenicians be sur¬ 
prised at our progress? 


LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS 


Years ago men carved pictures in caves (frontispiece) 


With twenty-six letters we can write any word 17 

Some of the men had narrow escapes 20 

They would mix paint out of colored clay 21 

American Indians wrote in picture language 25 

Wampum belts were used as records 31 

They carved inscriptions on the walls of temples 35 

Chinese drew pictures instead of writing words 37 

The Egyptians had three hinds of writing 45 

Egyptians too\ great pride in their writings 47 

The Babylonians lived in Asia 50 

The Phoenicians were merchants and traders 56 

Some of the letters in the Phoenician alphabet 57 

Forms of Hebrew writing 60 

The Greeks also built beautiful temples 64 

Greeks were scholarly and eager to learn 65 

A Gree\ inscription 66 

The Romans were victorious in their wars 71 

Rome was built 750 years before Christ 73 

Spaniards introduced the Roman alphabet 80 

Thousands of rough men from the north swept down 90 
The Norsemen were hardy sailors 94 

Castles and strongholds were built by the Normans 96 
Mon\s would spend years writing boo\s 99 

People were poor and scarcely any could read 107 

The modern printing press is a great change 110 










Chapter I 


HOW PEOPLE FIRST BEGAN TO 
WRITE 

W HAT a strange world this would be if 
nobody knew how to write! For then 
we should have nothing to read. We could not 
have any books, because men had to learn how 
to write before they could learn how to print. 
There would be no newspapers to tell us what 
is happening every day all over the world. We 
could not even exchange letters with our friends. 
We could not know anything except what we 
heard with our own ears. It would be hard 
for people to earn their living, because there 
would be no books to tell them how to do all 
sorts of things. People would have to live 
almost like animals. 

We are so used to reading and writing, and 
to seeing newspapers, magazines, and books 


Why do people 
write? 


11 


12 


MAN AND HIS RECORDS 


Why does 
writing seem 
wonderful to 
savages? 


everywhere we go, that we can hardly realize 
that there once was a time when nobody could 
read or write. Even today, in out-of-the-way 
parts of the world, there are some tribes of peo¬ 
ple that are like that. When they first meet 
people who can read and write, they are so 
surprised and puzzled that they think such 
people must be magicians. 

A man named John Williams, who lived 
among the tribes in the South Sea Islands many 
years ago, tells us a story that shows what a 
wonderful thing writing seems to people who 
never heard of it before. One day he was 
building a little house in another part of the 
island where he lived. He found that he had 
forgotten one of his tools. So he took a bit 
of black charcoal and a smooth, thin piece of 
white wood. With the charcoal he wrote on 
the wood a message to his wife, asking her to 
give this tool to the man who delivered the 
message. Then he handed the piece of wood 
to one of the natives of the island and told 


HOW PEOPLE FIRST BEGAN TO WRITE 13 


him where to take it. The native ran all the 
way, holding the piece of wood tightly clasped 
in his hand. 

When he arrived at the white man’s house, 
he gave the piece of wood to Mrs. Williams. 
After looking at it a moment, she went and 
found the tool, which she gave to the man to 
take back to her husband. This man was never 
so surprised before in his life. He thought 
that the piece of wood could talk, although it 
did not have any mouth. He was sure that 
there must be wonderful magic in such a piece 
of wood. So he tied it to a piece of string, and 
ever afterwards he wore it around his neck. 
He thought it would bring him good luck. 

Another story, very much like this one, is 
told by people who lived in Africa. A native 
was given a letter to deliver to a certain white 
man many miles away. It was a hot day, the 
messenger was lazy, and he decided to take a 
nap while he was on his way. So he picked 
out a nice shady spot by the roadside where 


14 


MAN AND HIS RECORDS 


How many 
letters are in 
our alphabet? 


How did the 
first people write? 


he could lie down and sleep. But first he took 
care to hide the letter under a big stone. He 
was afraid that the letter would see what he 
was doing and tell all about it to the man to 
whom he was carrying it, and that then he 
might be punished for being so lazy. 

Writing seems very easy to us, because we 
have an alphabet of twenty-six letters, and by 
putting those few letters together in different 
ways we can write any word we want to, and 
nobody will mistake that word for any other 
word. So when we speak of something that is 
very easy, we say it is as easy as A, B, C. 

But people did not learn to make an alphabet 
until thousands of years after they had been 
trying to write in more cumbersome ways, 
mostly by means of pictures. Even today there 
are millions of people in China who manage 
to write without an alphabet. A real alphabet 
was invented only once, nearly four thousand 
years ago, and all the alphabets in the world 
today that are used for ordinary writing have 


HOW PEOPLE FIRST BEGAN TO WRITE IS 


come down from that earliest alphabet. And 
the invention of that first alphabet was almost 
an accident, as we shall see later on. 

Such a simple thing—and almost an accident! 
Yet if the alphabet had not been invented the 
history of the world after that would have 
been quite different. For the alphabet made 
the people of Europe go forward much faster, 
in mastering the earth, than they would have 
gone without it. Countries whose people had 
no alphabet did not go ahead nearly so fast as 
the countries that had an alphabet. If Europe 
had never had an alphabet, we may be very sure 
that America would not have been discovered 
by Columbus, and that we would not have 
so many things to make life worth while today. 

Another thing that is very interesting is that 
this alphabet, which all of us use every day, 
and by means of which millions of copies of 
books and newspapers are constantly being 
printed, has come down to us, almost as it is 
now, from the Romans, who lived about 2,000 


What did the 
alphabet do 
for us? 


From where 
does our 
alphabet come? 


Did other 
ancient peoples 
have alphabets? 


16 MAN AND HIS RECORDS 

years ago. It is hard to think of anything else 
we use in our daily lives that goes back with so 
very little change to the days of ancient Rome. 
If Julius Caesar, a great Roman who lived be¬ 
fore the time of Christ, could come back to 
life today and pick up an American newspaper, 
he would know nearly every one of the letters 
in the headlines on the front page. Even more 
ancient peoples than the Romans would find 
many of the letters of our alphabet very much 
like certain letters in their alphabets. For our 
alphabet had its beginning among a people 
known as the Phoenicians. They were famous 
traders and merchants who lived in a country 
on the eastern end of the Mediterranean Sea. 

The alphabet, although it is so simple and 
easy to write, is really one of the most won¬ 
derful things in the world. We seldom stop 
to think of all the things that we can do with 
the alphabet. With those twenty-six little letters 
we can write any word that ever was spoken in 
any language in the world—and millions upon 


HOW PEOPLE FIRST BEGAN TO WRITE 17 


millions more. There are so many different 
ways you can arrange those letters that if you 
kept writing them down all your life you would 
not reach the end. 

Now we want to see how it happened, thou¬ 
sands of years ago, that people invented this 
wonderful thing we call an alphabet. The 
word alphabet, by the way, simply means A, B. 
The names of these two letters in the ancient 
Greek language were Alpha and Beta. Put 
these two names together, cut off the last letter; 
then we have the word alphabet. 

To find out how we got the alphabet, we 
must first go back many thousands of years to 
the time when men were just beginning to 
make life safer and more comfortable. 

But how did anyone ever think of trying 
to write for the first time? In the beginning, 
when no man could write, no one could teach 
writing to anybody else. No one had ever even 
heard of such a thing as writing. 

Well, back in the days when men lived in 


With twenty-six letters we 
can write any word 


Which Gree\ 
letters spell 
“alphabet?” 





18 


MAN AND HIS RECORDS 


Why did 
early man 
draw pictures? 


caves and wore the skins of wild animals for 
clothing, there were three things that men 
could do; three things which no other creature 
had ever thought of doing. First, they could 
build fires; second, they could make tools; and, 
third, they could draw pictures. They really 
did not need to draw pictures, although they 
did need to build fires and to make tools. But 
they liked to draw pictures, just as little children 
today do. It is a sort of instinct, something a 
person ddes because he wants to, and not just 
because he has been told to do that thing. It 
is a part of the instinct of imitation; that is, 
to copy things in the world about us. Animals 
such as monkeys like to imitate acts that they 
see being done, but no animal can draw pic¬ 
tures of acts or things. 

If we go into very old caves in France and 
Spain we find painted on the walls, pictures of 
the animals that the men who lived there many 
thousands of years ago, in the time known as 
the Stone Age, used to hunt. There are pic- 


HOW PEOPLE FIRST BEGAN TO WRITE 19 


tures of bison, deer, mammoths (great animals 
much like elephants), and other animals, as 
lifelike as if someone had just painted them. 

We also find scratched on pieces of bone, little 
engravings of various animals and of the men 
who hunted them. 

In Australia and in South Africa to this day 
there are tribes of people who live much the 
same kind of lives as did those men of the Stone 
Age in Europe. These people, too, like to 
paint pictures on the rocks, although they can¬ 
not read or write or do hardly anything else 
that civilized people can do. 

Why did these people who lived in caves, What did people 
so many thousands of years ago, want to draw draw P‘ ctures °f ? 
pictures of the animals they hunted? As we 
have seen, they made pictures by instinct; that 
is, they simply wished to do so. Perhaps it was 
because someone in the tribe liked to draw, 
or because they liked such pictures on the walls 
of their caves. Or again, perhaps one day one 
of the hunters had killed a great animal which 


20 


MAN AND HIS RECORDS 


Did the 
pictures 

mean anything? 


\ 


was a little larger than any they had ever 
brought into the cave before. Then it would 
only be natural that they would want to keep 
the memory of such an animal and of such 
an event. So someone would draw a picture 
of the animal on the wall of the cave. 

Perhaps some day the tribe would hold a 
big hunt. Maybe they found a herd of mam¬ 
moths or of bison, and the men had to fight 
with their clubs, their bows and arrows, and 
their axes as they never fought before. Some 
of the men perhaps had narrow escapes from 
being killed when the angry animals rushed 
at them. But the mammoths or the bison finally 
were all killed, and the men with their wives 
and children had a big feast, with much shout¬ 
ing and singing. It was one of the most famous 
events in the history of the tribe—a day that 
everybody wanted to remember. 

But how could they keep the story of the 
great hunt always in their memories when 
they had so many other things to remember? 


Some of the men had 
narrow escapes from 
being filled by wild 
animals 




HOW PEOPLE FIRST BEGAN TO WRITE 21 


They must have something to remind them of 
that famous day. A picture of the hunt would 
do just that. So the man in the tribe who could 
draw the best would be asked to make a pic¬ 
ture of the great hunt, perhaps on the smooth 
side of a stone cliff. He might have other men 
helping him on the job. They would mix some 
paint out of colored clay, or make a rude 
crayon out of a piece of charcoal. Then they 
would sketch the picture on the rock. 

So they now had a picture that would prob¬ 
ably last for many years. It was a story with¬ 
out words, that would always remind the tribe 
of that glorious day when they hunted the 
great herd of mammoths or of bison. When 
the people of the tribe looked at that picture, 
it would be almost as if they were reading in 
a book what happened on that day. In the 
same way, when we look at a famous painting 
today, like the one showing George Washing¬ 
ton crossing the Delaware River, we feel that 
the painting is telling us a story. 


They would mix some 
paint out of colored clay, 
or draw with charcoal 


With what 
did they draw? 



22 


MAN AND HIS RECORDS 


Did the early 
men \eep 
other records? 


But pictures were not the only things that 
early men depended upon to keep their mem¬ 
ories fresh. There was another way they had 
of refreshing their memories. They used this 
more in the way that we use numbers. It was 
a kind of arithmetic. They might want to 
remember how many men had been killed in 
a certain battle, or how many animals had been 
slain in a great hunt, or how many furs the 
tribe had on hand for trading. They could 
keep records like this by tying the right num¬ 
ber of knots in a piece of string, or by making 
the right number of notches in a piece of 
wood or nicks in a stone. Sometimes nowadays 
a person will tie a knot in a handkerchief or 
fasten a piece of string around his finger to 
remind him to do something. 

But making records in that way was not a 
step on the road to real writing. The trouble 
was that it was so easy to forget what the knots 
or the notches or the nicks really meant, after 
a long time had passed. In fact, nobody ex- 


HOW PEOPLE FIRST BEGAN TO WRITE 23 


cept the man who made them might ever know 
what they meant. But usually everybody could 
see what a picture meant, even a long time after. 

So for thousands of years men kept drawing What drawbacks 
pictures to remind them of important things 
that they wanted to remember, or that they 
wanted their children and grandchildren to 
know about. Now as long as the pictures were 
very simple ones, it was easy to see what they 
meant. But when people began to get more 
civilized, it was not so easy to put into pictures 
everything that they wanted to remember. 

They wanted to remember thoughts as well as 
things. There was a great chance they might 
make a mistake when they tried to put thoughts 
into pictures. Then, too, even the most care¬ 
fully drawn picture might tell one story to one 
man and another story to another man. 

In fact, it was sometimes very hard to draw 
a picture of some actual person or thing so 
that everybody would know what was meant. 

Take, for instance, the word enemy . Now 


24 


MAN AND HIS RECORDS 


How did 
the American 
Indians write? 


Were their 

methods 

successful? 


an enemy is usually a man, but a certain kind 
of man. And, of course, it was quite a prob¬ 
lem to draw a picture that would stand for a 
thought or an idea, such as “eating.” 

Let us see how such problems were solved. 
The American Indians used to do a lot of writ¬ 
ing by means of pictures. When an Indian 
drew a picture of an arrow, it meant an enemy, 
because an enemy was a person who shot an 
arrow at you. When he drew a picture of 
a piece of corn-cake in a man’s mouth, that 
meant eating. So these particular drawings 
were not just pictures. They stood for some¬ 
thing else than the actual things of which they 
were pictures. They were idea-signs. Of 
course, everybody had to agree that those pic¬ 
tures should be read in just that way. That 
was how people first began to learn to read. 

But there was still no way of drawing some¬ 
thing that would stand for just a sound. How 
in the world could a picture be made to mean 
a certain sound? And yet, there were some 



The American Indians wrote in a picture language 
on their tepees and wigwams 


25 



























26 


MAN AND HIS RECORDS 


Do two 
different words 
ever have the 
same sound? 


Was the 
game of rebus 
valuable to us? 


words that it was very hard to write, even by 
means of the pictures that we call idea-signs. 
Among these would be words like I and you, 
soft, hard, loud, good, bad, and so on. 

Now it happens in all languages that two 
different words will have the same sound. In 
English we have eye and I, yew and you, and 
many others. 

Did you ever play the game of rebus? In 
that game we make a picture of a certain 
thing stand for the sound of another word. 
We can write / by drawing a picture of a per¬ 
son’s eye. We can even write a whole sentence, 
like / see you, by means of three pictures: an 
eye, a large body of water, and a yew tree. 

We think of that sort of thing as a kind of 
joke, and that is probably how this scheme first 
began to be used by people who were trying to 
find a better way to write. But it was a very 
important step on the road that led to the 
invention of the alphabet; that is, certain signs 
which stood only for sounds, the same sign 


HOW PEOPLE FIRST BEGAN TO WRITE 27 


meaning the same sound—a consonant or a 
vowel—when used in all sorts of different 
words. First, a certain sign would stand for 
the sound of a whole word or a part of a word, 
called a syllable, but finally it came to stand 
for just the first sound in a word, such as b in 
box. Then that sign could be used in spelling 
any other word that began with b or that had b 
anywhere in it, and there would be other signs 
for the other sounds. 

So we see there were four steps leading up to 
the alphabet. First, there was a picture of a 
thing itself, such as a horse or an elephant. 
Second, there was a picture that stood for some¬ 
thing else, such as an arrow for an enemy. 
Third, there was a sign that stood for the sound 
of a whole word, which might be a very long 
word, or for a part of a word, called a syllable. 
Fourth, there was a sign that stood for just a 
single sound, like d, l, r, a, or u . If you had 
enough of the signs of this last kind, you 
could write any word you wanted to, very 


How many steps 
led to our present 
alphabet? 


28 


MAN AND HIS RECORDS 


Why was not 
the alphabet 
invented sooner? 


quickly and easily, and everybody could read 
it quickly and easily, and would know from the 
sound just what word it was. 

After the first three steps were taken, it would 
seem to us as if people would just naturally take 
the fourth step without any waiting, and throw 
away picture writing altogether. How much 
easier and pleasanter it would be to use just 
these little sound-signs, called letters. 

But, strange as it may seem, some of the 
greatest peoples in ancient times, though they 
came close to using an alphabet, never could 
free themselves altogether from the old pic¬ 
ture writing. They had become so used to 
writing by means of picture-signs, idea-signs, 
and sound-signs, all mixed up together, that 
they could not forget the habit and begin using 
an alphabet instead. So they went on writing 
in that way until long after the alphabet had 
been worked out by a people who were looking 
for a quick and easy way of writing. 


Chapter II 


THE WRITING OF THE AMERICAN 
INDIANS 

W RITING by means of pictures has been 
tried by almost all peoples and in all 
parts of the world at one time or another. Peo¬ 
ple living thousands of miles away from each 
other, in different parts of the earth, have tried 
to write that way. The American Indians were 
very skillful in this kind of writing. We can 
still see many of their picture writings on large 
rocks in various parts of the country. 

On a large surface of rock along the shores 
of Lake Superior there is a very famous Indian 
picture. It tells the story of a journey across 
the lake by a party of Indians led by a chief 
named The Wolf. The chief is shown by a 
picture of him, riding on a horse. Then there 
are five canoes, and the number of men in each 


How many 
nations tried 
to write by 
drawing pictures? 


29 


30 


MAN AND HIS RECORDS 


How did the 
Indians use 
nature signs? 


canoe—there are fifty-one men in all—is shown 
by a line of little straight marks on each canoe. 
There was another chief in the party, a friend 
of The Wolf. He was named The Kingfisher. 
The kingfisher is a kind of bird, and this chief 
is represented by a picture of that bird. 

The number of days that the journey took 
is made plain by the drawing of three arches 
and three disks under them. That means that 
the sun crossed the sky three times while the 
men were on their journey. Then there is a 
picture of a turtle, a land animal. This means 
that the party landed safely at the end of 
the journey. The story is told, you see, partly 
by actual pictures of things, such as the canoes, 
and partly by idea-signs, like the turtle, which 
does not mean a turtle but means land. 

Many of the Indian tribes had a curious sort 
of picture writing, in which the pictures were 
not drawn or painted but were worked out in 
shell beads fastened on a belt. These wampum 
belts, as they were called, were made of bark, 






ST he story was told in drawings 


WRITING OF THE AMERICAN INDIANS 31 


hemp, or strips of deerskin sewn together with 
sinews or hemp fibers. On these belts the In¬ 
dians stitched beads of shell in various patterns 
so as to make pictures or designs. There were 
black beads, dark purple beads, and white beads. 
The white beads were the ordinary wampum, 
while the dark beads were worth twice as much. 

Wampum belts were used as records of im¬ 
portant events. A certain wampum belt might 
tell about a treaty between one tribe and an¬ 
other, or between the Indians and the white 
men. A wampum belt might even be a record 
of the boundaries of a piece of land, or it might 
be a claim to ownership of the thing pictured. 

Then, too, wampum belts were used very 
frequently as money, like our bank-notes and 
dollar bills, which also have pictures and de¬ 
signs on them. Wampum was known as shell 
money. A great deal of this sort of money was 
used in trading among the Indians as well as 
between the Indians and the white people. 

There are very few of these wampum 
-n 


Wampum belts were used 
as records of important 
events 


How were 
wampum 
belts used? 





32 


MAN AND HIS RECORDS 


Where is a 
famous wampum 
belt today? 


left now. But sometimes you can see one of 
them in a museum. In the city of Philadelphia 
there is kept a very famous wampum belt. It 
is so interesting that we must look at it and find 
out what it has to tell us. It was given by the 
Iroquois Indians to the good Quaker, William 
Penn, who founded the colony of Pennsylvania, 
which is now one of our great states. This 
wampum belt was meant as a record of the 
friendship between the Indians and William 
Penn. On this belt there are eighteen strings 
of white wampum. In the center there are 
pictures, made of dark beads, of two men with 
their hands clasped. One is an Indian and the 
other is a white man. We know which is the 
white man, because he wears a hat; the Indians 
did not wear hats. Then there are three slant¬ 
ing bands across the belt. They represent the 
rafters of the Indians’ “long house,” the cen¬ 
ter of tribal life, and they mean the league of 
Iroquois tribes. 

By means of their pictures and idea-signs the 


WRITING OF THE AMERICAN INDIANS 33 


Indians could write letters to each other. They 
used strips of birch-bark for paper. 

Another use that the Indians had for writing 
was to make a record of their songs. They 
did this by drawing on a piece of birch-bark 
a series of pictures which would remind the 
singer of the things mentioned in the song, 
the pictures being arranged in the right order. 

Besides this picture writing, the Indians also 
knew how to keep accounts by tying knots in 
cords and cutting notches in sticks. In that 
way they could keep track of the number of 
days a party spent in traveling, and make rec¬ 
ords of how much one person owed another. 

The Peruvian Indians in South America 
also used knotted cords a great deal. Such a 
cord was called a quipu. There was a main 
cord; on this main cord there were fastened, 
at certain distances apart, thinner cords of dif¬ 
ferent colors, knotted in all sorts of ways. 
Each color stood for something different. For 
instance, red meant soldiers, yellow meant gold, 


How was cord 
used to \eep 
records? 


• 34 


MAN AND HIS RECORDS 


Were they 
satisfactory? 


Who were 
the Mayas? 


white meant silver, and green meant corn. A 
single knot stood for io, two single knots stood 
for 20, a double knot stood for ioo, and two 
double knots stood for 200. 

The Peruvians actually used these quipus 
for ordinary writing. The government de¬ 
pended upon them for recording the laws and 
for sending messages from one part of the Inca 
Empire to another. The story of a man’s life 
would be recorded on a quipu, and when he 
died, the quipu would be buried with him. But 
it was very hard for most people to read the 
meaning of a quipu. Quipus were useful for 
keeping account of sums, but they were a very 
poor way of trying to write. It was necessary 
to have a special class of men, trained for the 
job, to make the important quipus and to tell 
what they meant after they were made. 

In Central America and in Mexico there lived 
two other Indian peoples who had gone a long 
way toward civilization. They were the Mayas 
and the Aztecs. They had a very fine system 


WRITING OF THE AMERICAN INDIANS 35' 


of picture writing. They had actually reached 
the point, like the Egyptians and some other 
peoples of the Old World, where they had signs 
standing for sounds. They came very close to 
inventing an alphabet. But they never did so. 

These people used to write in bright colors 
with a feather pencil. They had a sort of 
paper made from the leaves of the maguey 
, plant. They used this paper for common writ- • 
ing. But for more important records they used 
cleaned and polished skins. They also carved 
inscriptions on the walls of their temples. Only 
ruins are left of their temples, and most of their 
books were destroyed by the Spaniards. 

But there are some Aztec-Maya T>ooks still 
left. They tell us about such things as the 
history of the people, their religion, and the 
bringing up of children. They are written 
partly in picture-signs, partly in idea-signs, and 
partly in sound-signs. The sound-signs stand 
for parts of words, which we call syllables. 


They carved in¬ 
scriptions on the 
walls of their 
temples 


How did 
they write? 












Chapter III 


Did the 
Chinese invent 
a way to write? 


THE CHINESE WAY OF WRITING 
HINA is a large country and a very old 



country. Hundreds of millions of people 
live there. Many centuries ago they invented a 
kind of writing. It is one they still use, for the 
Chinese people were cut off from the rest of 
the world for a very long time, and besides, they 
like to do things just as their forefathers did. 
When they finally learned about the alphabet 
from other people, they were so used to writing 
in the old way that they could not change. 

Probably the very first way that the Chinese 
had of keeping records was by means of knotted 
cords like those used by the Peruvians. They 
also made notches in wooden or bamboo sticks, 
and they made nicks in stones. But they soon 
went on to picture writing. 

At first, they made real pictures of such things 


Did the 
Chinese invent 
a way to write? 


36 


THE CHINESE WAY OF WRITING 


37 


as the sun, a fish, a horse, and a man. But the 
Chinese were becoming a very civilized people 
and they had many books to write. So they 
had to make the pictures more quickly, and then 
the pictures did not look so much like the real 
things. A little circle with a dot in it meant 
the sun; three sharp points meant mountains; 
a round hole meant the mouth; a stem with 
five branches meant the hand. 

In order to make signs for things that could 
not be shown by a single picture, two pictures 
would be joined together. The sun and the 
moon together meant bright; two hands, 
joined, meant friendship; a woman under a 
roof meant peace; an eye and water meant tears. 
In the same way, an ear between two doors 
meant the verb to listen . 

But even this arrangement did not make it 
possible to write every word so that its mean¬ 
ing would be perfectly clear. It happens that 
in the Chinese language the same word may 
mean many different things. You tell which 


What was their 
method? 


THIS 


TREE 


GIVES 




The Chinese drew pictures instead 
of writing words 


FIREWOOD 




38 


MAN AND HIS RECORDS 


What form 
did they 
finally use? 


thing a word means by the tone of voice that 
is used in speaking the word, just as if we should 
sing words instead of pronouncing them as we 
do. So the Chinese had to find a way of show¬ 
ing the different meanings of the same word 
when it was written. They found the answer 
to this problem by using the rebus, which we 
were talking about a little while ago. So they 
began writing signs that stood for sounds. 

Let us take the Chinese word fang. This 
means many different things, depending upon 
the way in which you use it. It means square 
and also nine other things. The sign used in 
writing the word square was a picture of two 
boats tied together. One of the other meanings 
of fang was place, or location . To write this 
word, the Chinese writer put down the sign for 
square, but he added to it another sign mean¬ 
ing earth. Then one of the signs gave the 
reader the sound of the word and the other 
gave him its meaning. Other meanings of the 
word fang were shown by adding to the first 


THE CHINESE WAY OF WRITING 


39 


sign, the sign for a door, which meant a room; 
the sign for words, which meant the verb to 
as\; and so on. 

Another example is the word chow. It 
means a ship and various other things, such as 
fluff, flickering, basin, and talkativeness. In 
order to write these other words, the sign for 
ship would be put down, joined with other 
signs. A pair of feathers meant fluff, fire meant 
flickering, water meant a basin, speech meant 
talkativeness. The sign for ship every time 
simply stood for the sound of the word. 

So the Chinese had three ways of writing 
words: by picture-signs, by idea-signs, and by 
sound-signs. They went on using the three 
ways, side by side, for many hundreds of years. 

There was another reason why the Chinese 
clung to their cumbersome writing. China is 
a very large country and the people in differ¬ 
ent parts of it do not talk just alike. If, in 
writing, the words were spelled out just as they 
sound, all the people would not understand 


What were their 
three ways 
of writing? 


40 


MAN AND HIS RECORDS 


How old is 
Chinese 
writing? 


Who were the 
first printers? 


them. But they can all read the picture-writing. 
The result is that a man from one part of China 
when he cannot understand the spoken words 
of a man from another part of China, can talk 
with him by writing on a slip of paper. 

Just how old the Chinese writing is, we do 
not know for sure. But we have samples of 
it, carved on rock, that are nearly 4,000 years 
old. Of course, the shape of the different signs 
has changed a good deal in that long time. The 
Chinese language is a very, very hard one to 
learn to write. Instead of learning a little al¬ 
phabet of twenty-six letters, like ours, a Chi¬ 
nese student has to learn about 40,000 different 
signs. 

Now, although the Chinese are the most old- 
fashioned people in the world in their way of 
writing, they were the first people who learned 
how to print. They printed books hundreds of 
years before books were printed in Europe and 
America. They also knew how to make paper 
long before our forefathers did. They wrote 


THE CHINESE WAY OF WRITING 


41 


with brushes of fine hair dipped in ink. They 
did not write from side to side, as we do, but 
in tall columns, with one sign below another. 

The Japanese learned how to write from the 
Chinese. They, too, have gone on writing in 
their own way. But they had to make many 
changes in the writing that they got from China, 
because the Japanese language is quite different 
from the Chinese. The Chinese language is 
made up of short words of only one syllable, 
while the Japanese language is made up of 
longer words of several syllables. The Japa¬ 
nese use some of the Chinese picture-words and 
idea-words, but they write mostly with sound- 
signs, each sign standing for a syllable of a word. 
There are fifty of these sound-signs, making it 
easier to write in Japanese than in Chinese. 

In recent years both the Chinese and the 
Japanese have been trying to write their lan¬ 
guages with our alphabet. But they find it 
very hard to do so, because they have become so 
accustomed to the old-fashioned way of writing. 


How did the 
Japanese learn 
how to write? 


What method 
do they use? 


Chapter IV 


How old is 
the Egyptian 
Race? 


WRITING IN ANCIENT EGYPT AND 
BABYLONIA 

J OURNEYING thousands of miles across 
Asia we finally reach Africa. Egypt is 
an interesting country lying in the northeast 
corner of that continent. Through the land of 
Egypt, for about a thousand miles, flows the 
river Nile. There is no rain in Egypt, but every 
year the Nile overflows its banks. The water 
spreads out for miles on each side and en¬ 
riches the soil. Then the land becomes alive 
with fields of growing grain. The valley of 
the Nile is like a broad green ribbon, hemmed 
in by the yellow sands of the great desert. 

The Egyptians, like the Chinese, are a very, 
very ancient people. Their history goes back 
about 7,000 years. Egypt was at one time the 
greatest kingdom in the world. The Egyptians 


42 


ANCIENT EGYPT AND BABYLONIA 


43 


built stately temples and great tombs for their 
kings. Some of these tombs, known as pyra¬ 
mids, can still be seen in that country. The 
Egyptians were a civilized people; in fact, they 
were the most civilized people in the world 
thousands of years ago. 

Of course the Egyptians knew how to write. 
To us, their writing looks very strange, stranger 
even than Chinese. It was very beautiful writ¬ 
ing, but writing in the Egyptian way took a 
great deal of time and effort. One had to be 
a very skillful artist in order to write in that 
way. 

Our study of Egyptian writing is very im¬ 
portant, because we are now for the first time 
getting on the trail that led finally to the in¬ 
vention of the alphabet. But the Egyptians 
themselves did not invent the alphabet. 

The Egyptians were very fond of carving 
stories of the great events in their history and 
in the lives of their kings, and stories about their 
gods, on the walls of their beautiful temples 


Did the Egyptians 
hjiow how 
to write? 


44 


MAN AND HIS RECORDS 


How did 
they write? 


Did they 
write booths? 


and palaces. These carvings were made with 
chisels. Many of these walls, covered with 
carved inscriptions, are still standing. They 
also painted many inscriptions on the coffins of 
their kings, called pharaohs, and other impor¬ 
tant people. The Egyptians were very anxious 
to preserve the bodies of their dead. They very 
carefully embalmed the bodies and made them 
into mummies. 

The Egyptians wrote many books. They were 
not like our books; they were strips of paper 
many feet wide, which were rolled up when 
not in use. This paper that the Egyptians used 
was made from strips of the papyrus, a water 
plant that grew on the banks of the Nile. 
Papyrus was not made in the same way as our 
paper. But the word paper comes from the 
word papyrus. The climate of Egypt is so dry 
that many sheets of this papyrus paper, covered 
with Egyptian writing, have been found buried 
in the sands, almost as fresh as when it was 
first made, thousands of years ago. 


ANCIENT EGYPT AND BABYLONIA 


45 


The Egyptians had three kinds of writing. 
They differed only in the way the words were 
formed. The first kind was called hiero¬ 
glyphics. It was used for the inscriptions that 
they carved on the walls of the temples and 
palaces. The second kind was easier to write. 
It was called hieratic, and it was used for im¬ 
portant writing on papyrus rolls. The third 
kind, known as demotic, was used for ordinary 
writing, such as personal letters and business 
records. This was still easier to write. But 
all Egyptian writing is very beautiful, especially 
the hieroglyphics . The Egyptians valued their 
writing for its artistic beauty almost as much 
as for what the writing meant. 

Although the Egyptians lived thousands of 
miles away from China and had no acquain¬ 
tance with the Chinese people, their scheme of 
writing was like that of the Chinese, but it did 
not look at all like Chinese writing. Egyptian 
writing consisted partly of picture-signs, partly 
of idea-signs, and partly of sound-signs. 


TRANSLATION 


Osiris 

the 

MATION 

SIWOtt 


How many \inds 
of writing did 
tkey have? 



The Egyptians had three \inds 
of writing 


imiriiijiumir; 
















46 


MAN AND HIS RECORDS 


When did the 
Egyptians learn 
how to write? 


Just when the Egyptians learned to write is 
not known. But it was very, very long ago. 
Egyptian writing is older than Chinese writing. 
Nearly 7,000 years ago the Egyptians were writ¬ 
ing in hieroglyphics and were using picture- 
signs, idea-signs, and sound-signs. There were 
about 1,700 of these signs. The hieratic writing 
we can trace back about 5,500 years, and the 
demotic writing nearly 3,000 years. 

The Egyptians probably started this writing 
with simple pictures. To make a picture of 
some familiar object, such as a chair or a house, 
was very easy, and everybody would know what 
it stood for, without having to ask questions. 
But we have already seen that it is impossible to 
draw a picture of hot or cold, good or bad, and 
words like that. So the Egyptians, like the 
Chinese, had to invent idea-signs, in which the 
picture does not stand for the thing shown in 
the picture, but for an idea which the picture 
suggests. When the Egyptians wanted to write 
the word busy they made a picture of a bee, for 



The Egyptians were highly civilized and too\ great 
pride in their writings 


47 





























48 


MAN AND HIS RECORDS 


Why did they 
add other signs 
to their pictur 
writing? 


the bee is a very busy insect. In the same 
way, a picture of a roll of papyrus meant knowl¬ 
edge, because books were made of rolls of papy¬ 
rus. A picture of a calf running toward some 
water meant thirst, and a picture of a whip 
meant power. 

But here again it was not always possible 
to make the meaning perfectly clear. So an¬ 
other sign was sometimes added, just as in 
Chinese writing, the other sign standing for 
the sound of the word. 

To show just how sounds were written in 
Egypt, let us take the name of a very beautiful 
stone, out of which the Egyptians loved to make 
necklaces and other kinds of jewelry. It is a 
blue stone which we call lapis lazuli. In the 
Egyptian language its name was kjiesteb. Now 
the Egyptian word meaning to stop was kjiesf, 
and the word for pig was tep. These two 
words, put together, sounded almost like \hes- 
teb; so the word for lapis lazuli was written 
with a picture of a man holding a pig by the tail. 


ANCIENT EGYPT AND BABYLONIA 


49 


The Egyptian word for mouth was ro . The 
written sign for it was shaped like a human 
mouth. But this sign could be used for the 
sound ro, or even for the letter r, in any other 
word. 

The Egyptians had about four hundred 
sound-signs standing for words or syllables. 
About twenty-five of these were used like our 
alphabetic letters. But they were all mixed up 
with picture-signs, idea-signs, and sound-signs 
standing for words and syllables. The Egyp¬ 
tians then might easily have thrown away the 
old, cumbersome way of writing and used only 
an alphabet. But they loved their beautiful 
old picture-writing too well to give it up.. So 
they went on using all the different kinds of 
signs until long after the alphabet had been 
invented by a neighboring people. Then Egypt 
was conquered by other nations and the Egyp¬ 
tians finally forgot their ancient writing. In 
fact, for nearly two thousand years nobody 
knew how to read the old Egyptian writing. 


Why was their 
writing difficult 
to read? 


50 


MAN AND HIS RECORDS 


Who were the 
Sumerians? 



It was only about one hundred years ago that 
a key to unlock its secrets was finally found. 

At the time that the Egyptians were carving 
their hieroglyphics on the walls of the temples 
along the Nile, there was another great people, 
living over toward the east, in Asia, who also 
had learned how to write. These people were 
the Sumerians. Their country was the land be¬ 
tween two rivers, the Tigris and the Euphrates. 
After it was conquered by the people called the 
Babylonians it became one of the greatest em¬ 
pires of the ancient world. 

Now, the writing of the Sumerians and 
Babylonians was based on the same plan as 
the writing of the Egyptians and the Chinese, 
though it did not look like either of them. It 
began with pictures of things, then it added 
idea-signs, and finally sound-signs. 

The writing of Babylonia is one of the strang¬ 
est in appearance that the world has ever seen. 
The reason it is so peculiar is that in Babylonia 
there was very little stone and no paper. Most 


The Babylonians lived in Asia 


ANCIENT EGYPT AND BABYLONIA 


51 


of the writing was pressed into the surface of 
soft clay tablets or cylinders which later were 
baked until they became very hard. So hard 
did they bake these clay tablets and cylinders 
that thousands of them have been found buried 
in the ruins of the cities of Babylonia, and the 
writing is still clear and sharp. 

Of course, when the Babylonians had to do Who used the 
their writing on soft clay, they could not use 
a pen or a pencil or a brush. They used a rod writing? 
made of a stiff reed or of metal, and with one 
end of it they stamped marks in the soft clay. 

As the marks that they made were sharp like 
a wedge, we call their writing cuneiform, 
which means wedge-shaped. They grouped 
these wedge-shaped marks in all sorts of ways. 

Now, it was very hard to make pictures by 
means of these little wedge-shaped marks; that 
is, pictures that looked at all like the things 
they stood for. But we can still see, in the 
way that the marks are arranged, that many of 
the signs were once real pictures. For instance, 


52 


MAN AND HIS RECORDS 


Did the 
Babylonians in- 
vent an alphabet? 


the sign which means the sun was made with 
four wedge-shaped marks arranged in a square, 
because they could not make a circle with these 
marks. In the signs for a star, a hand, a 
dagger, a reed, corn, and so on, we can see that 
these were meant for real pictures of those 
things, although they came to look less and less 
like them as writing was done more rapidly. 

Idea-signs, too, were freely used in the cunei¬ 
form writing, along with the picture-signs, and 
finally sound-signs were added, just as in Egyp¬ 
tian and Chinese writing. In fact, the Baby¬ 
lonians used more and more of the sound-signs 
standing for words or syllables, until a time 
came when all the writing was in sound-signs. 

Here again, it would have been the easiest 
thing in the world to make out of these sound- 
signs a real alphabet of single letters, and then 
use only the alphabet for writing. For the 
Babylonians had already, as we have just seen, 
given up the old picture-signs and idea-signs. 
But even that little step was too much for them 


ANCIENT EGYPT AND BABYLONIA 


53 


to take, because they had got into the habit of 
using the sound-signs for words and syllables. 

This queer wedge-shaped writing was used 
for many centuries. The Assyrians, when they 
conquered Babylonia, took over this writing 
and used it themselves. Then, when the coun¬ 
try was conquered by the Persians, they, too, 
began writing in the cuneiform signs. But 
when the Persian Empire fell, the wedge-shaped 
writing was forgotten and nobody wrote it any 
more. The secret of the funny little wedge- 
shaped marks was lost for hundreds of years. 

But at last some wise men found the key to 
the Babylonian writing, just as they found the 
key to the Egyptian writing. Now the world 
can read the thousands of clay tablets and cyl¬ 
inders that are being dug up out of the ruins of 
ancient cities in Babylonia, and we are learning 
a great deal about the kind of life the people 
lived in the land between the Tigris and the 
Euphrates in those far-off days when the world 
was young. 


When did the 
Cuneiform 
method die? 


Can we read this 
ancient writing? 


Chapter V 


HOW THE ALPHABET WAS BORN 


Why was not 
the alphabet 
discovered before? 


E GYPTIANS and Babylonians, as we have 
seen, came very close to writing with a 
real alphabet, but they never took the last short 
step that would enable them to do so. The 
good old ways of writing, as handed down 
by their forefathers, had too strong a hold on 
the people. They could not give them up for 
something different. 

But the idea of an alphabet was there, in 
both the Egyptian and the Babylonian writing, 
waiting for somebody to see it and put it to 
work. So it happened that the alphabet was 
given to the world by a people who knew both 
the Egyptians and the Babylonians, but who 
had no old-fashioned way of their own that 
they hated to give up. They saw how clumsy 
the Egyptian and Babylonian writing was, and 


54 


HOW THE ALPHABET WAS BORN 


55 


they wanted a quicker and easier way. But the 
sound-signs in those two systems of writing 
gave this other people, we now believe, the hint 
that led them straight to the invention of a real 
alphabet. 

We do not know just when the alphabet was 
invented. It may have been as long ago as 
nearly 2000 b. c. The people who invented the 
alphabet were Semites who lived in southwest¬ 
ern Asia. Explorers have found some of their 
writing carved on rocks in ancient turquoise 
mines in the rocky peninsula of Sinai at the 
head of the Red Sea, between Egypt and Pales¬ 
tine. Some time later, this alphabet was taken 
and changed by the Phoenicians, a Semitic peo¬ 
ple who lived along the coast of the Mediter¬ 
ranean Sea north of Palestine. The alphabet 
that they used consisted of twenty-two signs. 
We know a good deal about these signs. They 
were not picture-signs or idea-signs or sound- 
signs of words or syllables. They were just let¬ 
ters, like the letters of our own alphabet, except 


Who invented 
the first 
alphabet? 


56 


MAN AND HIS RECORDS 


Who were the 
Phoenicians? 



that they were only consonants, such as our let¬ 
ters B, D, K, M, S, T, and others. 

We must find out a little more about these 
Phoenicians, and see why it was that they 
wanted a way of writing that was quick, simple, 
and easy to read without making mistakes. 
The Phoenicians were one of the most inter¬ 
esting people of the ancient world. They were 
merchants, whose ships carried cargoes of 
valuable goods to and from all the ports of the 
Mediterranean Sea. They had great cities in 
their own country, such as Tyre and Sidon, and 
on the coast of Africa they built a splendid 
city named Carthage. They had colonies all 
around the Mediterranean Sea, on the Black 
Sea, in various parts of Asia Minor, and even 
in Egypt. 

There was another great people in this part 
of the world at about the time that the 
Semites invented the alphabet. They were 
the Cretans. They lived on the island of Crete, 
in the Mediterranean Sea between Greece and 


The Phoenicians were 
merchants and traded 
with many countries 




HOW THE ALPHABET WAS BORN 


57 


Egypt, and had colonies on the near-by coasts. 
They, too, knew how to write, but the secret 
of their writing has been forgotten, and we 
do not know how to read the samples of their 
writing that we find. It is possible that the 
Phoenicians got from the Cretans some hints 
about writing, but we cannot be sure about it. 
But the more we study the matter, the surer 
we become that the Phoenicians owed a great 
deal to the Egyptians in learning to write. 
Some of the letters in the Phoenician alphabet 
look strangely like some of the Egyptian signs 
that stood for sounds, and a few look like 
certain cuneiform signs. 

As we have said, these Phoenicians were 
famous traders. They were what we would 
call, nowadays, business men . They were not 
a people who had great kings and emperors 
and built magnificent temples and palaces like 
the Egyptians and the Babylonians. They 
were very busy people, and they did not have 
time for slow, cumbersome writing, no matter 


Some of the letters in the 
Phoenician alphabet resembled 
those of other nations 


MEM 

SHIN 

GIMEL 

ZAYIN 

YOD 

LAMED 

QOPH 


SAMEKH 


58 


MAN AND HIS RECORDS 


Why did the 
Phoenicians need 
an alphabet? 
did pictures have? 


how beautiful it might be. They needed, for 
their business, a way of writing that would not 
take much time and that everybody could 
understand easily. 

The chief use that they had for writing was 
probably the marking of labels on shipments 
of goods that they sent in their ships from one 
port to another. On a little label there was 
not much room; it was simply impossible to 
write anything on it in Egyptian picture 
writing or Babylonian cuneiform signs. So it 
was natural that the Phoenicians, instead of try¬ 
ing to use such cumbersome writing, should 
have borrowed the simpler alphabet which 
their relatives had invented. 

As we have seen, these Phoenicians were a 
trading people and had colonies in distant lands. 
It was they who first spread the alphabet far 
from its original home. Then many other 
peoples learned about the alphabet and began 
using it. The Phoenicians had only consonants 
in their alphabet. They did not write the 


HOW THE ALPHABET WAS BORN 


59 


vowels, because they did not think they were 

really necessary. Vowels were not so important 

in their language as they are in ours. So they How did they 

wrote in consonants only. The result was some- use the al P habet? 

what as if we wrote John Smith like this: jhn 

smth. They had only one set of letters, not 

capital letters and small letters, as we have. 

Other peoples living near the Phoenicians 
saw how much easier it was to write by using 
these simple little letters than by means of 
picture writing and sound-signs for words and 
syllables. 

Among these other peoples who were neigh¬ 
bors and relatives of the Phoenicians were the 
ancient Hebrews. They lived in the country 
now known as Palestine. The Hebrews, after 
they began using the alphabet, gave the letters 
a square, boxlike shape. Many great books 
were written in the Hebrew letters. The most 
famous is the Old Testament, the first part of 
the Holy Bible. 

The Phoenicians, when they began using 


60 


MAN AND HIS RECORDS 


How did the 
Hebrews write? 




their alphabet, wrote in long straight lines. 
Sometimes they wrote from the left side to the 
right as we do, and sometimes from the right 
side to the left. The Hebrews, when they 
started to use the alphabet, decided to write 
all the time from the right side to the left. The 
Jews still use the Hebrew alphabet. If you see 
a Hebrew book or newspaper, it will look as 
if the words were spelled backward, because 
the lines have to be read from right to left. 

We are now beginning to get much closer to 
the alphabet that we use today, although the 
Hebrew letters do not look very much like ours. 

Another interesting thing is the fact that each 
Hebrew letter had a real name. The letters 
were named for things that they seemed to look 
like, the names of which began with the various 
letters. 

The names of the Hebrew letters, and the 
things that the names mean (we are not quite 
sure of two or three of the meanings), are as 
follows: 




Early Hebrew writing called Moabite 




Modern form of Hebrew 




HOW THE ALPHABET WAS BORN 


61 


Aleph 

Ox 


Beth 

House 


Gimel 

Camel 


Daleth 

Door 


He 

Window 

What are the 

Vau 

Hook 

names of the 

Zayin 

Weapons 

Hebrew letters? 

Cheth 

Fence 


Teth 

Serpent 


Yod 

Hand 


Kaph 

Palm of Hand 


Lamed 

Ox-goad 


Mem 

Waters 


Nun 

Fish 


Samekh 

Post 


Ayin 

Eye 


Pe 

Mouth 


Tsade 

Javelin 


Qoph 

Knot 


Resh 

Head 


Shin 

Teeth 


Tau 

Mark 



You will notice that the names of the first 
two letters, which became our A and B, were 
Aleph and Beth. After the Greeks took over 
the alphabet, they changed these names slightly. 
Then the two words, as we have already seen, 
were joined together to make our word alpha¬ 
bet. So that word really came from Ox-House. 


Chapter VI 


Who were 
the Greeks? 


THE STORY OF THE GREEK 
ALPHABET 

P HOENICIAN commerce soon made the 
Phoenician alphabet familiar to other 
peoples. The neighboring Greeks were becom¬ 
ing a great people and were looking for a good 
way of writing. Some of the Greeks lived in 
Greece itself, which, as you will see on a 
map, is a peninsula in the southeastern corner 
of Europe. But there were thousands of them 
living on the islands of the Aegean Sea and 
along the coast of Asia Minor. 

The Greeks had come down from the north. 
They were a strong, hardy people. At first 
they did not have much need for writing. But 
as time went on they became more and more 
civilized. Finally they built up the finest 
civilization that the world had ever seen. The 


62 


THE STORY OF THE GREEK ALPHABET 63 


Greeks who lived among the Aegean islands 
and in Asia Minor were close neighbors of the 
Phoenicians. What could be more natural 
than that those early Greeks should borrow the 
alphabet from the Phoenicians and try to use 
it for writing their own language? 

Just when or where the Greeks began writing 
with the alphabet we do not know. According 
to a story that has come down to us from 
ancient times, a man named Cadmus, who 
founded the city of Thebes, in Greece, first 
brought the Phoenician letters to that country. 
But we cannot be sure that this story is true. 

In those days the Greek people were spread¬ 
ing out in many directions. Pretty soon they 
had towns scattered all over the shores of the 
Mediterranean Sea and even the Black Sea, 
from what is now southern Russia on the east 
to what is now southern France on the west. 
The Phoenicians also had towns scattered along 
those shores, and all of them were using 
different forms of the Phoenician alphabet. 


Did the Greeks 
borrow the 
Phoenician 
alphabet? 


When did they 
begin using it? 


64 


MAN AND HIS RECORDS 


Why did they use 
a number of 
alphabets? 



Thus the different Greek towns would borrow 
different kinds of alphabets, though they were 
all very much alike. So there were a number 
of different forms of the alphabet being used 
by the Greeks. 

At first, the Greeks began writing from the 
right-hand side to the left-hand side, just as 
the people who write Hebrew still do. But 
after a while they decided that they would 
rather start at the left-hand side and go over 
to the right, just as we do today. 

Now, as we have seen, the Greeks did not 
have any other real writing when they borrowed 
the alphabet from the Phoenicians. So they 
were not bound by any bad habits in writing. 
The alphabet was a brand new thing to them. 
When we take up anything that is new, we 
try to change it to fit our needs. That is what 
the Greeks did with the alphabet. They made 
quite a number of changes in it, because the 
Greek language was very different from the 
Phoenician and other Semitic languages. 


The Greeks also built 
beautiful temples which 
are now in ruins 






THE STORY OF THE GREEK ALPHABET 65 


For instance, in the Greek language vowels 
were more important than they were in those 
other languages. The Greeks did not want to 
leave out the vowels when they wrote their 
language. But what should they do about it? 
Well, it happened that there were some con¬ 
sonants in the Semitic languages that the Greeks 
did not have in their language. So they took 
the letters that stood for those consonants and 
made them stand for vowels in the Greek 
language. They invented a few other letters 
and added them to the alphabet. 

So the Greeks had a letter for A, a letter for I, 
a letter for U, and eventually letters for two 
kinds of E’s and two kinds of O’s. One of their 
letters for E was pronounced like our e in prey, 
and the other like our e in get . One of their 
letters for O was pronounced like our o in go, 
and the other like our o in for . 

As we were saying, there were at first a 
number of different kinds of Greek alphabets. 
But they were all more or less alike, and after 


The Greeks were scholarly 
and eager to learn from their 
wise men 


How did the 
Greeks finally 
write? 






66 


MAN AND HIS RECORDS 


same 

alphabet later 
used by all 
Greeks? 

a while, all the people who wrote Greek used 
the same kind of alphabet, just as all the people 
today who write English use the same kind of 
alphabet. The Greeks learned to use the same 
kind of alphabet everywhere, because they 
were now becoming a very civilized people. 
They had great poets and other writers, and 
many books were being written. The kind of 
alphabet with which these great books were 
written soon became the standard alphabet. 

Many of the greatest books that the world 
has ever known were written in Greek. Among 
them were the poems of Homer and the works 
of great thinkers, whom we call philosophers, 
like Plato. The part of the Bible known as 
the New Testament, which tells about the life 
of Christ, also was written in Greek. 

The Greek letters were very beautiful, for 
the Greeks loved beauty, and they wanted to 
make their letters handsome. 

In the Greek alphabet, after it reached its 
final form, there were twenty Tour letters, mak- 


PA^ A*7°Ai £ K P/M N T° A , . . . 

/i G ree\ inscription 


THE STORY OF THE GREEK ALPHABET 67 


ing two more than there were in the Phoenician 
and Hebrew alphabets. Their names and the 
letters in our alphabet for which they stand are: 


Alpha 

A 

A 

Beta 

B 

B 

Gamma 

G 

r 

Delta 

D 

A 

Epsilon 

E (Short) 

E 

Zeta 

Z 

Z 

Eta 

E (Long) 

H 

Theta 

Th 

© 

Iota 

I 

I 

Kappa 

K 

K 

Lambda 

L 

A 

Mu 

M 

M 

Nu 

N 

N 

Xi 

X 


Omicron 

O (Short) 

O 

Pi 

P 

n 

Rho 

R 

p 

Sigma 

S 

s 

Tau 

T 

T 

Upsilon 

U 

Y 

Phi 

Ph 


Chi 

Ch 

X 

Psi 

Ps 

* 

Omega 

O (Long) 

o 


You will notice that although some of these 
letters look strange, more than half of them are 
familiar, such as A, B, E, I, K, M, N, O, T, Z. 


What are the 
names of the 
Gree\ letters? 


68 


MAN AND HIS RECORDS 


What happened 
to the Grecian 
alphabet? 


Why is our 
alphabet different 
from theirs? 


About 350 years before the birth of Christ 
a mighty king arose named Alexander the 
Great. He became the ruler of a great Greek 
empire which took in nearly all the known 
world. Greek towns and cities sprang up all 
through this vast empire. The Phoenicians 
had now dwindled away, and the Greeks took 
their place as the great trading people of the 
world. They carried the Greek alphabet with 
them wherever they went. After many years, 
the Greek alphabet was pushed out, by other 
alphabets, from most of the lands where it 
once flourished. But it is still used in Greece 
and among the near-by islands, and the letters 
look the same as they did 2,500 years ago. 

But why is not our alphabet more like the 
Greek alphabet than it is? The reason is that 
we did not get our alphabet directly from the 
Greeks. Another great people knovfrn as the 
Romans, who lived in Italy, took over an early 
form of the Greek alphabet and changed it. 
Our ancestors learned the alphabet from them. 


Chapter VII 


THE STORY OF THE ROMAN 
ALPHABET 

A NOTHER great people, the Romans, 
- soon saw how helpful it was to have an 
alphabet. So they borrowed the alphabet from 
others. And now, after many years, and with 
few changes, we are still using the one used 
in the old Roman Empire. 

The only changes that have taken place are, 
that we have added two or three letters by 
writing some of the Roman letters in more 
than one way, and we have added a set of small 
letters. The Romans used only capitals. But 
no entirely new letters have been invented since 
the days of the Romans. 

That is the reason why the alphabet that 
we use is still known as the Roman alphabet. 
It is used not only by English-speaking people, 


Where did the 
Roman alphabet 
come from? 


69 


70 


MAN AND HIS RECORDS 


How many people 
now use this 
alphabet? 


Who were 
the Romans? 


but by many other great peoples of the world 
today. It is the alphabet of the French, the 
Spaniards, the Italians, the Germans, the Hol¬ 
landers, the Belgians, the Danes, the Swedes, 
the Norwegians, the Poles, and other peoples 
of Europe. Recently, even the people of 
Turkey have borrowed this alphabet and are 
now learning to write their language with it. 
And, of course, it is used all over North and 
South America, in Australia and New Zealand, 
in South Africa, and in many other places. 

Who were these Romans, the people who 
gave us the alphabet? If you will look at a 
map, you will find a city in Italy, on the river 
Tiber, called Rome. The city of Rome was 
built about 750 years before the birth of Christ. 
At that time, Egypt and Babylonia had been 
great civilized empires for hundreds of years. 

The Romans belonged to the Latin race; the 
country around Rome was called Latium. 
These people had come down from the north, 
just like the Greeks. At first they led very 


THE STORY OF THE ROMAN ALPHABET 71 


simple lives in little towns and on their farms, 
and so did not have much need for writing. 

Now, there were many Greek towns in 
southern Italy, where the people were using 
the early Greek alphabets, while to the north 
of Rome there lived a very civilized people 
called the Etruscans who also had an alphabet 
which they had borrowed from the Greeks. 

The men who have studied this subject are 
not sure just how the Romans got their alpha¬ 
bet. Some think that they borrowed it from a 
Western form of the Greek alphabet, which the 
Greeks had brought to southern Italy, where 
they had many towns. Others think that the 
Romans borrowed their alphabet from the 
Etruscans who, as we have seen, got theirs from 
the Greeks. However it was, the Romans owed 
their alphabet to the Greeks. 

The Romans, like the Greeks before them, 
were making their first start in real writing. 
They wanted the best way of writing that they 
could get, and they had no old-fashioned ideas 


The Romans were victorious in 
their wars and conquered many 
lands 


How did the 
Romans get 
their alphabet? 





72 


MAN AND HIS RECORDS 


How did they 
change the 
alphabet? 


about writing, like the Egyptians and the 
Babylonians, that held them back. They did 
not care how the Phoenicians and the Greeks 
had used the alphabet. So they made quite a 
number of changes in it. 

We have seen how the Greeks made two 
different kinds of E’s and O’s. But in the 
Roman alphabet the letter H, which the Greeks 
finally made into long E, kept its original sound 
as a consonant. The Greeks at first pronounced 
the letter like that, just as did the Phoenicians. 
So today we pronounce it as in Henry, except 
when it is silent. The Romans did not add an¬ 
other kind of O. 

Then there was in the Phoenician alphabet 
a letter like our Q. The Greeks had no use for 
it, and so they finally threw it out of their al¬ 
phabet. But the Romans wanted that letter, 
and so they kept it in their alphabet. There was 
a sound in their language that this letter fitted. 

There were two Greek letters the Romans 
did not want at first, but after several hundreds 



The city of Rome was built about 750 years before the 
birth of Christ 


73 























74 


MAN AND HIS RECORDS 


What characters 
did the Romans 
add? 


of years they decided to take them in. These 
were our Y and Z. As a matter of fact, they 
had already made their U out of the Greek 
Y. But they now wanted Y as well as Z to 
make it easier to spell some of the words they 
were borrowing from the Greek language. So 
they added these two letters. 

The letter F was one that the Greeks took 
from the Phoenician alphabet. They used it 
for a while, but later they tired of it and stopped 
using it. So it was not in the Greek alphabet 
when that alphabet reached its final form. The 
Greeks had pronounced it about like our W. 
But the Romans took the letter into their 
alphabet, and so it has come down to us. They 
pronounced it just like our F. For that sound 
the Greeks had made another letter, called 
Phi, which looked like a circle with a straight 
line drawn through it. So the Romans left 
this letter out. But we spell words that come 
to us from the Greek, like photograph, with 
ph instead of with /. 


THE STORY OF THE ROMAN ALPHABET 75 


One or two other Greek consonants were 
also left out by the Romans. 

The letter K has had an interesting history. 
It was a letter of the Phoenician alphabet, 
which the Greeks took over, and which the 
Romans, in turn, placed in their alphabet. 
Now the third letter of the Greek alphabet had 
the sound of our letter G, like the g in game . 
The Romans changed the shape of the Greek 
letter to that of our letter C. It happened that 
the Etruscans pronounced the sound of C (as 
in cat) and of G (as in game) almost alike. So 
the Romans, who were greatly influenced by the 
Etruscans, used the letter C for both sounds. 
They used it in this way for a long time. As 
they did not need two letters for the same 
sound, they stopped using K almost entirely. 
After a long time, they began to separate the 
two sounds again. But instead of taking K 
back, they decided to use C for the K-sound. 
Then they took C, put a little bar on the lower 
part of it, and made it into the letter G. They 


What characters 
did they change? 


76 


MAN AND HIS RECORDS 


put the new letter G into the seventh place 
in the alphabet, where Z was in the Greek 
alphabet. You will remember that the 
Romans had thrown away Z at first. And 
that was why, still later, when they took Z 
back, they had to put it at the very end. 

But the Romans did not completely forget 
K. They kept it in the spelling of a few names 
and things like that. It stayed in its old place 
in the alphabet, although very seldom used. 
So it has come down to us along with the 
other letters. We use it a great deal more than 
the Romans did. Although C has kept the 
sound of K, which the Romans gave it, it has 
come to be pronounced like S when it stands 
before E, I, and Y, as in cent, civil, scythe. So 
we use K before those vowels when we want 
to keep the consonant “hard,” as in \eg, \itten, 
s\y . In many words we join C and K together, 
as in tac\ and thic\en. 

Our letter G usually has the sound that the 
Romans gave it when they made the letter, as 


THE STORY OF THE ROMAN ALPHABET 77 


in our word go. But before E, I, and Y it is 
sometimes “soft,” as in gem, engine, and 
stingy, and sometimes “hard,” as in get, give, 
and craggy. 

Although there have been no really new let¬ 
ters added to the alphabet since the time of 
the Romans, we have made some additional 
letters out of others by writing them in more 
than one way. 

For instance, the letter J was once the same 
as I. Until about 300 years ago, the name 
John was written lohn. Then a little curve 
was added to the bottom of the letter when 
it was used as a consonant, and we got the 
letter J. We now pronounce J like G in the 
name George , but in other languages it is 
pronounced like Y and other letters. 

Then there was the letter V. The Romans 
pronounced it like our W when it was a 
consonant, and like our U when it was a vowel. 
During the Middle Ages it was pronounced 
as we pronounce V, when it was a consonant. 


Have we made 
any changes in 
the Roman 
alphabet? 


78 


MAN AND HIS RECORDS 


Where did the 
Romans carry 
their alphabet? 


Two V’s were sometimes written together, 
and called Double U, for U and V were still 
the same letter and both were called U. In 
English we pronounce W just as the Romans 
pronounced V. W is an important letter in 
all the languages of northern Europe, but it 
is not used in the languages of southern Europe, 
except in words and names taken from other 
languages. The letters U and V did not become 
entirely separate until about 300 years ago. 

About the time of the birth of Christ, Rome 
had become so great and powerful that it 
ruled most of Europe and all the lands in Asia 
and Africa bordering on the Mediterranean 
Sea. Wherever the Romans went, they car¬ 
ried their alphabet with them. In the coun¬ 
tries of the East, the Greek and other alphabets 
had so strong a foothold that the Roman 
alphabet could not drive them out. But in 
Western Europe it was used everywhere. When 
the Roman Empire fell, the alphabet lived on 


Chapter VIII 


THE ALPHABETS OF ASIA, OCEANIA, 
AND AFRICA 

W E HAVE seen how, out of that little 
alphabet of the Phoenician trader, there 
grew the beautiful Greek alphabet and the 
great Roman alphabet which has come down 
to us almost unchanged. 

But the Phoenician alphabet was the an¬ 
cestor of many other alphabets, which, al¬ 
though the letters were often changed so that 
you would never think that some of them ever 
had anything to do with other alphabets, are 
really cousins of the alphabet that we use. The 
alphabet family, now scattered all over the 
world, is a very large one. Different branches 
of the family wandered all over Asia, out into 
many of the islands of Oceania, and down into 
Africa. 


Did the alphabet 
spread through 
many lands? 


79 


80 


MAN AND HIS RECORDS 




How did the 
alphabet travel? 


In Western Asia there sprang up, at a very 
early time, two kinds of alphabets, both de¬ 
scended from the Phoenician letters. One of 
these alphabets spread out in a northeasterly 
direction across Asia, being greatly changed as 
it went, until it reached the Pacific Ocean. 
Another branch of the same alphabet went 
southwestward into Africa and a long time 
later crossed the Indian Ocean and went as far 
as the Philippine Islands. The other alphabet 
also divided into branches, one going across 
Asia until it, too, reached the Pacific Ocean, 
along a route south of the other alphabet; 
another branch traveling along the southern 
coast of Asia and out into Oceania to the 
Philippines. So when the Spaniards brought 
the Roman alphabet to the Philippines, about 
four hundred years ago, all three of the chief 
branches of the alphabet family came together 
again in those far-off islands, thousands of miles 
from the land where the first alphabet was 
born. 


, \ The Spaniards brought 
the Roman alphabet to 
the Philippines jour 






ALPHABETS OF ASIA, OCEANIA, AFRICA 81 


We have already seen that one of the earliest 
alphabets which came from the Phoenician 
alphabet was the Hebrew, with its square, box¬ 
like letters. Another early alphabet was that 
of the Arabs, who were relatives of the 
Phoenicians and of the Hebrews. But the 
Arabic letters were very different in shape from 
the Hebrew ones. Their letters were full of 
curves and graceful flourishes. The Arabs 
valued their writing for its beautiful looks 
about as much as for its meaning. Strangely 
enough, the alphabet that we use today—that 
is, the capital letters—looks more like the 
alphabet of those early Phoenician traders than 
does the Hebrew or the Arabic alphabet. The 
reason is that the Romans, like the Phoenicians, 
were a very busy people who valued writing 
for its meaning, and so they kept close to the 
simple forms. 

But the Hebrews and the Arabs followed 
the Phoenicians more closely in one way. They 
did not use vowels; all their letters were con- 


What was 
another early 
alphabet? 


82 


MAN AND HIS RECORDS 


Who carried the 
alphabet to India? 


sonants. That was because their languages 
were very much like the Phoenician language, 
and the vowels were not thought to be very 
important. After a long time, however, the 
Hebrews and the Arabs decided that they 
should have vowels in their writing. But as 
they did not have any letters to spare, because 
their consonants w r ere the same as the Phoe¬ 
nician consonants, they had to put little marks 
underneath the letters, like dots and dashes, 
to stand for vowels. 

As early as 500 years before Christ, mer¬ 
chants carried a Semitic alphabet to India. 
But the people of India were not Semitic. They 
spoke an Aryan language, of the same family 
as that to which the languages of the Greeks 
and the Romans belonged. Its name was 
Sanskrit. So the Hindus, like the Greeks and 
the Romans, had to make many changes in 
the alphabet so that it would fit their language. 
The changes that the Hindus made were much 
more cumbersome than those that the Greeks 


ALPHABETS OF ASIA, OCEANIA, AFRICA 83 


and the Romans had made. They changed 
the shape of the letters so much and invented 
so many new letters that you would never 
imagine that the Hindu alphabet is a relative 
of ours. Unlike the Greeks and the Romans, 
they did not make separate letters for vowels. 
They did as the Hebrews and the Arabs did: 
they put little marks under the consonants to 
show the vowels in the words. 

Now, at about this time a new religion was 
springing up in India, called Buddhism. The 
sacred books of this religion were written with 
the Hindu alphabet. When Buddhism spread 
into other countries, the Hindu alphabet went 
along with it and was borrowed by the peoples 
of those other countries. Each people changed 
the alphabet to suit their own needs. So it 
was that different forms of the Hindu alphabet 
came to be used in their writing by the peoples 
of Ceylon, Burma, Siam, Indo-China, Java, 
Sumatra, Borneo, Celebes, and some of the 
islands in the Philippines. 


What changes did 
the Hindus 
ma\e? 


How did the 
Hindu alphabet 
spread? 




84 


MAN AND HIS RECORDS 


Who borrowed 
this alphabet? 


Into what other 
countries did the 
alphabet travel? 


Another form of the Hindu alphabet spread 
northeastward across Asia, passing through all 
sorts of changes on the way. It was borrowed 
by a number of different peoples, such as 
those of Tibet and Korea, when they became 
Buddhists. Buddhism also entered China. 
But as we have seen, the Chinese for hundreds 
of years had had a different kind of writing 
of their own, something like the old Egyptian 
writing. They were so used to writing in the 
way of their forefathers, for whom they had 
very deep reverence, that they did not want to 
change their habits and try writing with an 
alphabet. So to this day the Chinese still 
write with their ancient picture-signs, idea- 
signs, and sound-signs, all mixed up. 

Meanwhile, another kind of alphabet, very 
close in form to the ancient Phoenician, began 
to spread from Asia Minor through central 
Asia. It was carried onward by a group of 
Christians called the Nestorians, who were 
very powerful in Asia hundreds of years ago. 


ALPHABETS OF ASIA, OCEANIA, AFRICA 85 


This alphabet, too, was taken up by different 
peoples and changed to suit their needs. It 
became the parent of alphabets such as the 
Uigur, the Mongolian, and the Manchu. The 
Manchus, who learned to write with one of 
the forms of this alphabet, live north of China 
in a country bordering on the Pacific Ocean. 

There were several other alphabets in south¬ 
western Asia, such as the Pehlevi in Persia, and 
the Armenian in the region of the Caucasus 
Mountains. 

Then there was the alphabet used by the 
Arabs, at which we have already taken a 
glance. Arabia is the great sandy peninsula 
in the southwestern corner of Europe. When 
the Arabs first began using their alphabet, 
nobody could have dreamed that it had such 
a wonderful future ahead of it. But about 
600 years after Christ, a man named Mo¬ 
hammed, who lived in Arabia, preached a new 
religion which was known as Moham¬ 
medanism, or Islam. The Mohammedans had 


Did the Arabs 
have an alphabet? 


86 


MAN AND HIS RECORDS 


How did the 
Arabic alphabet 
spread? 


Where did it go? 


a sacred book called the Koran, which was 
written, of course, with the Arabic alphabet. 

The Mohammedan religion soon began to 
spread into many other countries. Wherever 
it went, the Arabic alphabet went, too. So it 
happened that this alphabet came to be used 
in more lands than any other alphabet except 
the Roman. People wrote with the Arabic 
letters all over Asia Minor and in Persia. This 
alphabet was carried along the northern coast 
of Africa, from Egypt to Morocco. When the 
Arabs conquered Spain, this alphabet made 
itself at home there, too. It was used in Spain 
for hundreds of years, until the Christians 
drove out the Mohammedans. Since then, of 
course, the Roman alphabet has been the 
alphabet of Spain. 

Northeastward, the Arabic alphabet made 
its way into Turkestan. Southeastward, it 
made a long jump across the Indian Ocean, 
with the Mohammedan religion, and was soon 
being used in many of the islands of the East 


ALPHABETS OF ASIA, OCEANIA, AFRICA 87 


Indies and by the Mohammedan part of the 
Philippine Islands. 

When the Turks came down into Asia 
Minor, they, also, used the Arabic alphabet. 
Later, they conquered Constantinople and a 
great deal of southeastern Europe, including 
most of Greece, the countries now known as 
Jugoslavia, Bulgaria, and Roumania, and a 
large part of Hungary. But the Christian 
people who lived in those countries kept on 
using their own alphabets, and when they 
drove out the Turks the Arabic alphabet went. 

After Turkey became a republic, a few years 
ago, the President, a wise man named Mustapha 
Kemal, decided that the Arabic alphabet was 
too slow and awkward, and that the people 
of Turkey would make faster progress if 
they wrote their language with the Roman 
alphabet. So he issued an order that in the 
future all the people must stop using the 
Arabic alphabet and use the Roman alphabet 
instead. Today all the people of Turkey are 


What great 
country used 


Why was it 
changed? 


88 


MAN AND HIS RECORDS 


What are two 
alphabets used 
in Africa? 


learning their A, B, C,’s, just like little children 
4 n American schools. 

There are two other very curious alphabets 
that found a home in Africa many hundreds 
of years ago. One of them, known as Coptic, 
was used by the Christian people of Egypt, 
the Copts. It has now gone out of use except 
in their sacred books. This alphabet is re¬ 
lated to the Greek. The other alphabet, the 
Ethiopic, is the alphabet of Abyssinia, a 
Christian country in Africa south of Egypt. 

Most of Africa is now ruled by European 
countries, such as England, France, Belgium, 
and Portugal. Of course, wherever people of 
European blood live in that great continent, 
they use the Roman alphabet. 

The Roman alphabet is coming more and 
more to be the alphabet of the whole world. 


Chapter IX 


WRITING IN THE MIDDLE AGES 

F OLLOWING the history of writing from 
the end of the Roman Empire to the be¬ 
ginning of modern times is most interesting. 
As we have already noticed, the Romans car¬ 
ried their alphabet with them into all the 
countries that they ruled. In some of these 
countries the people were using other alpha¬ 
bets, and they did not care to change. But in 
Western Europe all the different peoples began 
to use the Roman alphabet. 

The Romans used for their ordinary writing 
wooden tablets covered with a coat of wax. 
They wrote by cutting the letters into this wax 
with a stylus, a pointed piece of metal shaped 
something like a pencil. Afterwards, the 
writing could be rubbed out and the tablet 
used over again. There was papyrus paper, 


What instruments 
did the Romans 
write with ? 


89 


90 


MAN AND HIS RECORDS 


Did they 
use paper? 


brought from Egypt, but that was too ex¬ 
pensive for common use. Then, too, there was 
finely polished skin, called parchment and 
vellum. This was used a great deal, at a later 
date, for important writing. We still use this 
skin paper, which is very beautiful but quite 
expensive, for college diplomas and things of 
that kind. 

About 400 years after the time of Christ, 
thousands of rough men from the north swept 
down upon the Roman Empire. After a long 
struggle, that great empire fell. For many 
hundreds of years after that, wars were going 
on nearly all the time in Europe, and very few 
people could read or write at all. 

But learning was kept alive in places called 
monasteries, where men known as monks used 
to live. These monks made copies of the 
Bible, of other religious books, and of the 
works of the great Roman writers. They used 
parchment and vellum. These books were 
called manuscripts, which means written by 


Thousands of rough men 
from the north swept down 
upon the Roman Empire 



WRITING IN THE MIDDLE AGES 


91 


hand, but the pages were bound together and 
covers put on them, so that they looked a good 
deal like printed books. 

Both capitals and small letters were used in 
writing these manuscripts. Where did the 
small letters come from? You will remember 
that the Romans used only capital letters. 
When the letters were carved on the stone 
walls of the temples and other public buildings, 
they were quite like our capital letters, each 
letter standing very straight. But when the 
Romans wrote on parchment and vellum 
they sloped the letters and changed the shape 
slightly. These were called uncial letters. 

From these uncial letters there grew up, in 
Italy, a sort of writing in smaller letters, called 
semi-uncial, or minuscule. The forms of the 
letters were changed somewhat, so as to make 
them easier to write. This kind of writing was 
used for many centuries in Europe, during the 
Middle Ages. It gave us our small letters. 

These small letters could be written much 


Where did small 
letters come 
from? 


92 


MAN AND HIS RECORDS 


Why were 
small letters 
used? 


Who used 
difierent forms 
of letters? 


more quickly and easily than capitals. So the 
capital letters were kept only for the titles of 
chapters and the initial letters of paragraphs 
and sentences. The men who wrote the manu¬ 
scripts were sometimes called scribes, which 
means writers. They made the manuscripts 
look very beautiful. They used to paint little 
pictures in the manuscripts, and they painted 
the capital letters in different colors, such as 
red and blue and gold. Sometimes the parch¬ 
ment also was colored. One of the most 
beautiful manuscripts of the Middle Ages, a 
Gothic Bible, is written with gold and silver 
letters on purple vellum. 

About the end of the twelfth century, the 
scribes began using a slightly different form of 
letters. This was called Black Letter, Gothic, 
or Old English. The letters were shaded so 
that they looked very black. We have all seen 
Old English, for it is still used sometimes. 
The names of some of our newspapers, for 
instance, are printed in Old English at the top 




WRITING IN THE MIDDLE AGES 


93 


of the first page. It looks very artistic, but it 
is not so easy to read as the letters we now use. 

We must go back now to see what changes 
were taking place in the alphabet itself, in 
England and in other countries of Europe, 
during the Middle Ages. 

Long before the end of the Roman Empire, 
the people of Britain, who belonged to the 
Celtic race, learned how to write and were 
using the Roman alphabet. When the Empire 
began to break up, the Roman troops left Eng¬ 
land. Germanic tribes, such as the Angles and 
the Saxons, from the Continent of Europe 
poured into England and divided up the coun¬ 
try among themselves. They were fierce, war¬ 
like people, who had little use for writing. But 
when missionaries from Italy converted the 
Anglo-Saxons to Christianity, those who 
learned to write used the Roman alphabet. 

When the people whom we call the Anglo- 
Saxons came into England, they borrowed the 
Celtic form of the Roman alphabet. 


Who were the 
Angles and 
Saxons? 


94 


MAN AND HIS RECORDS 


Where did the 
Runic alphabet 
come from? 


Meanwhile, there was a strange-looking 
alphabet, very different from the Roman, 
which had spread through northern Europe. 
This was the Runic alphabet. It is almost for¬ 
gotten today, because nobody has written with 
it for many hundreds of years. This queer 
alphabet probably sprang from the Greek 
alphabet and was carried northward by Gothic 
traders who made their way from Constanti¬ 
nople along the Russian rivers. Others think 
that it may be a very crude form of the Roman 
alphabet. It was used chiefly in Scandinavia 
and by the Norsemen who went to live in 
other places. There were many Norse settle¬ 
ments in England. The Runic letters also 
were used in Iceland. The Anglo-Saxons when 
they came into England were familiar with 
the Runic alphabet. The runes were used by 
their priests and magicians for carving short 
inscriptions on rocks. 

When the Anglo-Saxons took over the 
Roman alphabet, they added to it two extra 


The Norsemen 
were hardy 
sailors 





WRITING IN THE MIDDLE AGES 


95 


letters borrowed from the Runic alphabet. 
These two letters were named Wen and Thorn. 
They looked very much alike, being shaped 
something like a small p . One was pronounced 
like our W and the other the same as our Th. 

The Anglo-Saxons did not have the letters 
K, Q, or Z in their alphabet. The letter C was 
always pronounced “hard,” as in cat, never 
“soft,” as in cent . The letter G, also, was 
always pronounced “hard,” as in get. 

There was another alphabet, still stranger 
than the Runic, which was used by some peo¬ 
ple, in England and more in Ireland but it 
quickly died out. This was known as the 
Ogam alphabet. The letters looked very much 
like the shorthand of our day. They were up¬ 
right or slanting strokes drawn above, below, 
or right through a straight line. 

When the Normans came over from 
northern France and conquered England, 
about 900 years ago, they brought with them 
the regular Roman alphabet, which the people 


Did the Anglo- 
Saxons make use 
of all twenty-six 
letters? 


Who brought 
the regular 
Roman alphabet 
to England? 


96 


MAN AND HIS RECORDS 


Did the English 
then use it? 



of France and other countries of southern and 
western Europe had been using right along 
since the days of the Roman Empire. After a 
while the scribes in England forgot the old 
Anglo-Saxon alphabet and began to use the 
Roman alphabet in much the same form as we 
have it today. 

But the Normans had different ways of 
pronouncing some of the letters. They pro¬ 
nounced C like S, and G like J, when they 
came before the vowels E, I, and Y. We have 
already noticed the two ways of pronouncing 
C and G in the English language today. As 
we were just saying, the Anglo-Saxons did not 
use K in their alphabet, because C always had 
the same sound as K. But after the coming of 
the Normans, it was necessary to put K back 
into the alphabet in order to write words like 
kettle. But there was no extra letter that 
could be used in order to show the different 
sounds of the letter G, as in get and gem. In 
words that come to us from the Anglo-Saxon 



WRITING IN THE MIDDLE AGES 


97 


language, G is always “hard,” but in words 
that come to us from the French language it 
is “hard” when it comes before A, O, and U, 
and “soft” when it comes before E, I, and Y. 

Some English words, you see, come to us 
from the Anglo-Saxon and some from the 
French. Many of these French words, in turn, 
came first from the Latin. We have also bor¬ 
rowed hundreds of words from the Greek and 
other languages. That makes the English 
language very rich in words. But it causes 
trouble with our spelling. Some of these words 
borrowed from other languages we continue 
to spell as they were spelled in those other 
languages, though we have changed the pro¬ 
nunciation. That is why so many English 
words are not spelled just as they sound, and 
so when we go to school we have to spend a 
lot of time learning how to spell words. 

Most other peoples that use the Roman 
alphabet spell every word just as it sounds, 
each letter always having the same sound 


From where do 
our English 
words come? 


Why are they 
not all spelled 
as they sound? 


How many letters 
do the Italians 
use? 


98 MAN AND HIS RECORDS 

whenever it is written. That makes it ever so 
much easier to learn how to spell. In English 
we have many words that are spelled very 
much alike but pronounced differently, such as 
laughter and slaughter, while other words are 
pronounced very much alike but spelled dif¬ 
ferently, such as receive and believe . This 
makes it very hard for foreigners to learn to 
write and pronounce English correctly. Still, 
it is much easier to spell English words today 
than it was hundreds of years ago, when the 
word fish was spelled fysshe. 

We use twenty-six letters in our alphabet, 
but other peoples who use the Roman alphabet 
get along with fewer. The Italians, for in¬ 
stance, find twenty-two letters enough. 

In Russia (including the parts of Siberia 
where Russian people live) and in the countries 
of southeastern Europe in the region of the 
Balkan Mountains (Jugoslavia and Bulgaria) 
the Roman alphabet is not used. The people 
there write with a cumbersome alphabet of 



Mon\s would sometimes spend years carefully writing 
their booths in longhand 


99 





























100 


MAN AND HIS RECORDS 


What is the 
Cyrillic alphabet? 


thirty-six letters, which look very strange to 
us. This is called the Cyrillic alphabet. It was 
invented during the Middle Ages, and it came 
from the Greek alphabet. In Greece the 
people still use the alphabet of their forefathers. 
There are now small letters as well as capitals 
in the Greek alphabet. The small letters were 
developed by the scribes in the Middle Ages. 

So far, we have not said anything about our 
numbers—the figures o to 9. While they are 
not, strictly speaking, a part of the alphabet, 
we use them all the time in our writing, and 
of course we could not do our arithmetic 
without them. 

Neither the Greeks nor the Romans had fig¬ 
ures for numbers. They used certain letters of 
the alphabet in the place of figures. We still 
sometimes use Roman numbers. Probably you 
have seen them carved on the corner-stones of 
buildings or used in the numbering of chapters 
in books. I stands for 1, V stands for 5, X stands 
for 10, L stands for 50, C stands for 100, and so 


WRITING IN THE MIDDLE AGES 


101 


on. This was a very awkward way of writing 
figures. For instance, to write 38 you must use 
seven letters: XXXVIII. 

The numbers that we use today are called 
Arabic numerals. But they really came first 
from India. They are very old. Some of them 
we can trace back before the time of Christ. 

One of these numbers is a very curious and 
very important one. It is the figure 0, which 
we call zero. It was not invented until a long 
time after the other numbers. Although the 
figure o stands for nothing, it means a great 
deal to us in arithmetic. 

We simply could not get along today without 
the Arabic numbers, because without them it 
would be impossible for us to add and subtract, 
and to multiply and divide, quickly and easily. 
In fact, we could not do very difficult sums at 
all. Just think of trying to multiply CCCXXXI 
by LXVII (331 by 67)! 

The Hindu figures were brought to Europe 
during the Middle Ages by the Arabs. That 


Who gave us 
our numerals? 


Are they 
important to us? 


Is the numeral 
system universal? 


102 MAN AND HIS RECORDS 

is why we call them Arabic numbers or nu¬ 
merals. The first country of Europe where 
they were used was Spain, a land that was ruled 
by the Arabs at that time. 

These figures are now used all over the 
world, by peoples speaking all sorts of different 
languages and even using very different forms 
of the alphabet. The figure 9 for instance, 
means just the same thing to an Englishman as 
to an Italian, although the word nine is different 
in each language. 

During the Middle Ages punctuation marks 
began to be used. Punctuation marks, such as 
periods and commas, help to make clear the 
meaning of that which we write. 

It was not until after the invention of print¬ 
ing that handwritten letters became different 
from letters that came to be used in print. In 
modern handwriting the letters are made 
rounder and are joined together so that we can 
write more easily and rapidly, without lifting 
the pen from the paper except between words. 


Chapter X 


THE COMING OF THE PRINTING 
PRESS 

B UT it was not enough for the world to 
know how to write by hand. We could 
not have newspapers and magazines and books 
for everybody until the world learned how to 
make thousands of copies of a manuscript. 

Now, we know that the Chinese knew how 
to print as long ago as before the birth of 
Christ. But printing in Chinese was very slow 
and expensive work. You remember there is 
no Chinese alphabet. There are about 40,000 
different signs, one for each word. For a long 
time the Chinese used to carve wooden blocks 
for a whole page, but finally they began to make 
movable types; that is, a separate piece of type 
for each word. But even this was awkward. 
Think of having to keep on hand a supply of 


Did the Chinese 
find printing 
easy? 


103 


How is printing 
done? 


104 MAN AND HIS RECORDS 

each of the 40,000 types, and then searching 
among them for the right ones! 

It was only when people who used a real 
alphabet learned how to print that they could 
get the most profit from the invention. You 
simply carve out of wood or metal a supply of 
each of the letters of the alphabet. Some must 
be carved backward, so that when ink is spread 
over them and they are pressed against a sheet 
of paper, the marks left on the paper will be 
shaped properly. For instance, B must be 
carved backward in making the type, because 
the two sides are not alike. 

Also, in setting up lines of type so as to make 
words or sentences, of course you always have 
to go from right to left, so that when the page 
is printed on paper the lines will go from left 
to right and we can read them. 

When people who had an alphabet began to 
use printing, they could make so many copies 
of books quickly and cheaply that thousands 
of persons could afford to buy them. 


THE COMING OF THE PRINTING PRESS 105 


The Greeks and the Romans had many great 
writers. Why in the world did they not learn 
how to print books? They already had a sort 
of idea of printing, because they had seals, 
with which they could make copies of pictures 
and designs in soft wax. And they had coins 
stamped with pictures and words. 

But only a few of the Greeks and the Ro¬ 
mans had time for reading, anyway. Most of 
the people had to work very hard all day. The 
few rich people who had time to read could 
afford to buy handwritten books. And even if 
printing had been known, there was no cheap 
paper to print books on. Papyrus and parch¬ 
ment and vellum were very expensive, and they 
were not suitable for printing. 

So before it would be really worth while to 
print books, certain things would be necessary. 
First, there would have to be thousands of peo¬ 
ple who could read and who wanted books. 
Second, they must have time for reading. Third, 
they must be able to pay a reasonable price for 


Why was not 
printing done 
in Greece and 
Rome? 


106 


MAN AND HIS RECORDS 


Did people buy 
boo\s during the 
Middle Ages? 


How was 
paper made? 


books. Fourth, there would have to be a kind 
of paper that did not cost very much. 

During the Middle Ages most of the people 
were very poor, scarcely anybody could read or 
write, and there were wars going on nearly all 
the time. But about 500 years ago things be¬ 
gan to get better. There were not so many 
wars. Trade and commerce brought more and 
more wealth to the leading countries. More 
people were learning how to read and write. 
Thousands wanted books, for they had time 
to read them and they were willing to pay a 
reasonable price for them. 

Now, it happened that not long before this 
a way had been found for making paper out 
of cheap things, especially out of old rags. Old 
rags, which were so worthless that they could 
be had almost for nothing, made very fine, 
strong, white paper after they were cleaned. 

It was the Chinese, again, who first learned 
how to make real paper. The papyrus paper 
used by the Egyptians was not real paper. It 


THE COMING OF THE PRINTING PRESS 107 


was just strips of the papyrus plant laid cross¬ 
wise upon each other and stuck together. In 
making real paper different kinds of fiber are 
beaten into a pulp and pressed together. 

Over one hundred years before Christ, the 
Chinese had learned how to make paper out of 
small branches of the mulberry tree, certain 
kinds of bark, bamboo, leaves, and similar 
things. From China a knowledge of how to 
make paper was carried to Persia and Arabia, 
probably by traders, about 600 years after Christ. 

The Arabs soon began to make paper, using 
old rags. When the Arabs conquered Spain, 
they made paper in that country. It was in 
Spain that the first paper mill in Europe was 
built. There, too, a very fine kind of paper, 
called linen paper, was made out of the fibers 
of the flax plant. At about this time, also, the 
art of making paper came into eastern Europe 
from Damascus. 

Before the year 1400, paper mills had been 
built in Italy, France, England, and Germany. 


People were poor 
and scarcely any 
could read 


How did the 
Chinese ma\e 
paper? 


Where was the 
first paper mill 
built in Europe? 










108 


MAN AND HIS RECORDS 


When did people 
become interested 
in boo\s? 


That was long before the discovery of America. 
Paper was not made in America until the year 
1690, when a man named Rittenhouse built a 
paper mill in Germantown, Pennsylvania. 

It was soon after paper began to be made in 
all the chief countries of Europe that people 
began to be greatly interested in books, espe¬ 
cially the works of the great Greek and Roman 
writers. And, as we have seen, they had money 
to buy them with, and time for reading them. 
Of course, printing just had to be invented. 

We are not quite sure when or where print¬ 
ing first appeared in Europe. Some think that 
the knowledge of printing was brought to Eu¬ 
rope from China by the Mongols. These peo¬ 
ple, during the Middle Ages, conquered all the 
lands from China to Russia, and even Poland 
and part of Germany. 

But long before books began to be printed, 
the scribes who copied manuscripts were print¬ 
ing, with wooden blocks, beautiful initial letters, 
which could be used over and over again. And 


THE COMING OF THE PRINTING PRESS 109 


people were learning how to stamp trademarks, 
playing cards, designs for cloth, and pictures. 

It is said that about the year 1420, a man 
named Laurens Coster, of Haarlem, a city in 
Holland, was making movable types and print¬ 
ing books. By movable types we mean types 
that can be put together for printing a book and 
then taken apart and used over again. But it 
is not likely that Coster actually had a print¬ 
ing press; none of his books exist. 

Anyway, by about 1438 a man named Jo¬ 
hannes Gutenberg, who lived in Strasbourg, a 
city on the river Rhine, had a printing press 
and was beginning to print books from mov-> 
able type. Some time later, he moved his print¬ 
ing press to Mayence, another city on the Rhine. 
One of the first books he printed was the Bible. 

Soon there were printing presses in other 
countries of Europe. In 1474, a man named 
William Caxton began printing books at West¬ 
minster, near London. His was the first Eng¬ 
lish printing press. The first printing press in 


Who was 
]ohannes 
Gutenberg? 


110 


MAN AND HIS RECORDS 


Why was it 
necessary to ma\e 
type in both 
capitals and small 
letters? 


Where was italic 
type invented? 



the New World was set up in the City of Mex¬ 
ico as early as 1544. The first one in what is 
now the United States was established at Har¬ 
vard College, near Boston, in 1639. 

At first, all books were printed in the Gothic 
or Old English type, often called Black Letter. 
But to read a whole book printed in this type 
was very slow work and hard on the reader’s 
eyes. People wanted a type that was easier to 
read. So after a while very much simpler forms 
of letters were made, both capitals and small 
letters. This new type was then used in print¬ 
ing books in France, England, and other coun¬ 
tries. In Germany, however, the old Black 
Letter type continued to be used. 

Another kind of type that was invented was 
called italic, because it came from a kind of 
handwriting used in Italy. Italic type is still 
used a good deal, especially for printing certain 
words or sentences that we want to stand out. 

The first printing presses were worked by 
hand. The type was kept in little boxes. In 


The modern printing press is a great change 
from the old 



















THE COMING OF THE PRINTING PRESS 111 


setting up the type for a book, each letter had 
to be picked out of the box and fitted in with 
the others. Then the pages were printed by 
pressing down a large plate of type, over which 
ink had been spread, on sheets of paper. This 
was slow work but much faster than if 
each copy had to be written out by hand. 

Books were made in that way until man 
learned how to make steam and electricity do 
his work. Now we have great printing presses 
driven by machinery that can be operated ever 
so much faster than the old kind of printing 
presses. So books, magazines, and newspapers 
can now be printed very quickly and cheaply. 

We also have machines that set up the type, 
which formerly had to be set by hand. 

Then, too, we have typewriters, on which we 
can write letters and other things that do not 
need to be printed much more quickly than we 
can write with pen or pencil. Typewriters 
first came into use about fifty years ago. Now 
there are millions of them. 


What has modern 
machinery done 
for printing? 


Only a few years ago boo\s were printed 
on these presses 




112 


MAN AND HIS RECORDS 


Where did 
quills come 
from? 


Would the early 
Phoenicians be 
surprised at our 
progress? 


But we still do a good deal of writing by hand. 
In the old days, the only pens that people had 
were quills. These were the feathers of cer¬ 
tain birds, such as the goose. The blunt end 
was sharpened and the point was then slit with 
a knife. A person wrote by taking one of these 
quills and dipping its sharp end in ink. Later 
came steel pen points; these were fastened into 
wooden holders. Now we have fountain pens. 

There are times when we like to write with 
pencils. We call them lead pencils because at 
first they were really pieces of lead, with which 
one could make marks on paper. But now our 
pencils are made of graphite, a kind of carbon. 

So today we have many different ways of 
writing, but we still use the same old alphabet. 
Just think how surprised those old Phoenician 
traders who first spread the alphabet would 
be if they could come back to earth and see how 
we are using the alphabet in our writing and 
printing, with fountain pens, typewriters, and 
printing presses driven by electricity! 







* 




/ 









































































































